Google's style guide is a popular reference for Go programmers. In it, they list off a number of scenarios where one would use a value receiver vs a pointer receiver. But, ultimately, they end the list with "when in doubt, use a pointer receiver".
In my experience, I've noticed the majority of Go programmers I encounter default to using pointer receivers in all circumstances. And I have a hard time justifying any protest because the scenarios typically don't fall into the "approved" set where value receivers are recommended. I also notice that my IDE (GoLand) defaults to returning a pointer to a struct when I use its "Generate Constructor" auto-complete functionality. I can't help but suspect this was motivated by the "when in doubt" advice from Google. I'd be curious to hear thoughts on this topic. I tend to advise developers to default to value receivers because I perceive benefits to avoiding nil pointer exceptions. But it's hard to substantiate my advice as anything idiomatic. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/0f45d769-2f8d-49e3-85e4-3b2f46c8ac42n%40googlegroups.com.
